An Important Update About Readlists

Jonathan Poritsky got a small interview with Richard Ziade (the CEO of Readability/Arc90/Readlists) and asked about whether the service crosses a line. Ziade didn’t answer, so Poritsky (and this made me happy) pressed the question again and this time Ziade tried to frame it against the web in general — which has been the response I get (if I get one). That’s a bullshit answer, the question was directly asked about your service, not the web and as a CEO you need to answer that clearly for your service. Here’s what Ziade told Poritsky as part of the interview:

Now, we’re not sure how this plays out. Keep in mind, Readlists is an experiment. It’s free. We’d love to talk to publishers and writers about how we can tweak it so they can derive value from it. That’s ultimately what we want to do because the tools we build come out of a love for writing.

He’d love to talk to publishers? I’ve emailed them three times now asking my site be “opted-out” as they call it. I have emailed Ziade several times before. I pinged Ziade, Chris Dary, and Arc90 COO, Bobby Ziade on this matter.

No response.

Bobby Ziade even followed me Wednesday and I DM’d him asking to be opted-out.

Screenshot of my DM to Bobby Ziade

Again, no response.

This isn’t a matter of me being impatient because I have copies of emails they have sent to other writers that have asked to be opted-out — at this point it is them actively ignoring my takedown requests.

So it sounds like Ziade is either lying to Poritsky when he said “We’d love to talk to publishers and writers”, or he really means any writer and/or publisher that doesn’t publicly call foul — which is exactly the people they should be talking to.

Update: I now have confirmation that I have been “opted-out” of Readlists. You should ask for the same (using the feedback link at the bottom of their site, just say “please opt-out [domain name]”).

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tl;dr

Jonathan Poritsky got a small interview with Richard Ziade (the CEO of Readability/Arc90/Readlists) and asked about whether the service crosses a line. Ziade didn’t answer, so Poritsky (and this made me happy) pressed the question again and this time Ziade tried to frame it against the web in general — which has been the response […]